I'm trying to do plan a Circle Pacific Fare.

My starting point is ORD and I would like to go to Bali, Bangkok, Sydney and back to ORD. I have 3 weeks to do this; I would like to stop over in Bali for 3 days in Bali, 15 days in Bangkok, and 12 days in Sydney. I plan to travel over Labor Day, so leaving 8/27 coming back 9/18.

Any other cool places to stop over on this fare? (couple days in Africa? India?)

Anyone ever do an itinerary like this before? How much is the coach fare for the Circle Pacific Fare?

You won't fit this routing into a LCIR22 fare (22,000 miles) so will need to work with the LCIRR26 (26,000 miles will be tight) or LCIR29 (29,000 miles). One problem is that ORD is a long way east and you need a lot of miles just to get to the US west coast. I am working on getting to ORD using a DCIR22 from BNE and can just fit it in.

Assuming you are starting from ORD, I will also assume you are an AA member. Note that L fares in the AA program provide 100% miles, while on CX and QF you are not going to score too mant miles. Others who are experts in the AA program will be able to clarify exactly how many miles for CX and QF flights in L.

So you basically have two ways over the North Pacific, being CX (shortest route is ORD-YVR on AA then YVR-HKG on CX), or on AA's ORD-NRT flight. In coach, AA may be the better option as you bet a 777 with MRTC and the extra miles in AAdvantage. But you will still need to get to HKG on CX to make the other Asia connections.

The shortest mileage route to include BKK and DPS (Denpasar, Bali) and then on to SYD is HKG-BKK-HKG-DPS-PER-SYD. But note that DPS-PER only operates 2 days a weeks. The alternate is HKG-DPS-HKG-BKK-SYD.

For the SYD-LAX you should book the AA codeshare flight to maximise the AA miles earning.

You can only have 2 stopovers per region, so DPS and BKK would be the two for Asia and NRT/HKG will need to be transit stops only (less than 24 hours). Otherwise you can purchase up to an additional 2 stopovers per region (except region of origin, USA in your case).

So you could fit this routing into a LCIR26 fare:

ORD-NRT-HKG-BKK-HKG-DPS-PER-SYD-LAX-ORD = 25,217 miles.

The latest fare info I can find has the ex-USA fare for LCIR26 as US$3400 plus taxes.

For comparison, the ex-Australia DCIR22 fare I recently booked as BNE-LAX-DFW-ORD-YVR-HKG-BNE worked out at just over US$4000 (US$4200 inc taxes) in business class. The ex-USA fare for DCIR26 is US$5900 plus taxes.

You cannot go any further west than Thailand on the Circle Pacific fare, so India is not an option. And Africa is not on the Pacific Ocean so that is not an option either.

You could include a stopover in Perth or even include Auckland in the 26,000 miles.

Awesome info!

Thanks very much.